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Born in Launceston in 1929, Peter Sculthorpe was educated at the University of Melbourne, and Wadham College, Oxford. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, where he began teaching in 1964. He was been a a visiting fellow at Yale University, USA, and Sussex University, UK, and has taught at universities within and outside Australia. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Tasmania, Melbourne, Sussex and Griffith. An Officer of both the Order of Australia and of the British Empire, in 1998 he was elected a National Trust of Australia Living National Treasure. In 2002, he was elected to Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Peter Sculthorpe has written works in most musical forms. His output relates closely to the social and physical climate of Australia, and the cultures of the Pacific Basin. He was influenced by the music of Asia, especially during the 1960s by that of Japan and Indonesia. In recent years he has become more deeply influenced by the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island music and culture.

Sculthorpe's work is the subject of four books, Michael Hannan's Peter Sculthorpe: His Music and Ideas 1929 - 1979 (1982), Deborah Hayes's Peter Sculthorpe: A Bio-Bibliography (1993), and the composer's own memore Sun Music: Journeys and Reflections from a Composer’s Life (1999). Graeme Skinner’s authorised biography, Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of an Australian Composer, covering the years 1929 to 1974, was published in 2007.

Sculthorpe celebrated his 80th birthday in 2009.

Born in Launceston in 1929, Peter Sculthorpe was educated at Launceston Church Grammar School, the University of Melbourne, and Wadham College, Oxford. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, where he began teaching in 1964. He was a Harkness Fellow at Yale University, USA, in 1966, and a visiting professor at Sussex University, UK, in 1971-72. He has taught at universities within and outside Australia, and he holds honorary doctorates from Tasmania, Melbourne, Sussex and Griffith. An Officer of both the Order of Australia and of the British Empire, in 1998 he was elected one of the National Trust of Australia’s Living National Treasures. In 2002, he was elected to Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Peter Sculthorpe has written works in most musical forms - especially orchestral, chamber, and instrumental - and his output relates closely to the unique social climate and physical characteristics of Australia, and to the cultures of its Pacific Basin neighbours. His geographical outlook as an Australian caused him to be influenced by much of the music of Asia, especially during the 1960s by that of Japan and Indonesia. In recent years his music has become more deeply influenced by the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island music and culture in which he has taken a lifelong interest.

Sculthorpe's work is the subject of four books, the first by Michael Hannan (Peter Sculthorpe: His Music and Ideas 1929 - 1979, University of Queensland Press, 1982), the second by Deborah Hayes (Peter Sculthorpe: A Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Press, 1993); and the third by the composer himself (Sun Music: Journeys and reflections from a composer’s life, ABC Books, 1999). The fourth, Graeme Skinner’s authorised biography, Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of an Australian Composer (UNSW Press), covering the years 1929 to 1974, was published in Sydney in 2007, and a fifth, by Fiona Richards, is forthcoming.

Sculthorpe celebrated his 80th birthday in 2009. His eighteenth string quartet will be premiered in 2010.

Born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1929, Peter Sculthorpe was educated at Launceston Church Grammar School, the University of Melbourne, and Wadham College, Oxford. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, where he began teaching in 1964. He was a Harkness Fellow at Yale University, USA, in 1966, and a visiting professor at Sussex University, UK, in 1971-72. He has taught at universities within and outside Australia, and he holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Tasmania, Melbourne, Sussex and Griffith. In 1977 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the Birtish Empire (OBE) and was recipient of a Silver Jubilee Medal. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1990.

Since 1965, Sculthorpe's music had been published internationally by Faber Music. His catalogue of compositions consists of well over 350 works. His compositions are regularly performed and recorded throughout the world. He has written in most musical forms and his output relates closely to the unique social climate and physical characteristics of Australia, and to the cultures of its Pacific Basin neighbours. His geographical outlook as an Australian caused him to be influenced by much of the music of Asia, especially during the 1960s by that of Japan and Indonesia. In recent years his music has become more deeply influenced by the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island music and culture in which he has taken an active interest since his teenage years.

Sculthorpe has a deep love for his country and its landscape, which he regards as sacred. One of the most constant themes in his output is the protection of Australia’s environment, as well as that of the whole planet. His preoccupation, too, with the frailty of the human condition can be heard in works such as Earth Cry (1986) and the choral Requiem (2004), His String Quartet No 16 (2006) grew from his concern about women and children killed in the war in Iraq, the latter from the plight of asylum-seekers in Australian detention.

The recipient of many awards, Sculthorpe regards the most significant as being chosen as one of Australia’s 100 Living Treasures (National Trust of Australia, 1997), Distinguished Artist 2001 (International Society for the Performing Arts), Honorary Foreign Life Member (American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2003) and one of the 100 Most Influential Australians (The Bulletin, 2006).

Sculthorpe’s work is discussed in books by Michael Hannan (Peter Sculthorpe: His Music and Ideas 1929-1979, University of Queensland Press, 1982), Deborah Hayes (Peter Sculthorpe: A Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Press, 1993), and the composer himself, in his memoir Sun Music (ABC Books, 1999). Graeme Skinner’s biography, Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of an Australian Composer, covering the years 1929 to 1974 was published in Sydney in 2007 by UNSW Press. Fiona Richards's monograph on Irkanda IV, his 1961 work for solo violin, strings and percussion, will be published in 2009.

It’s not easy to talk about one’s life when it embraces eighty years, so I’m going to talk about some of the landmarks of my life. Even these I can only mention briefly.

I was very privileged to have a very happy childhood and to be very content at school. My mother had been headmistress of a primary school before she married and she loved English literature, and she instilled a deep interest in it, and of learning in general, in me. My father, on the other hand, was very much concerned with the natural world. He loved fishing and from him, I inherited his love for nature and the environment.

When I decided that I wanted to study music in Melbourne, my mother was perfectly happy because she knew that it was what I really wanted to do. However I was only 16 and my father didn’t want me to leave home, and he was also worried that I wouldn’t have any financial security through music. Because of my passion for cars, he offered to buy me any sports car I wanted, if I stayed home. He probably would have beggared himself to do it. I ended up saying to him “a car is only a car Dad, but music is my life”. He understood that and therefore I went to Melbourne.

They were wonderful years from 1946 – 1950, and afterwards I went back to Tasmania, and in a way my father was right: I couldn’t earn much money through music. I did a bit of teaching and finally I went into business with my brother running a ‘Huntin, Shootin and Fishin’ shop with my brother Roger.

When Roger was young, my parents decided he should learn the violin. We use to play little pieces together on the violin and piano and I always wondered why Roger always finished ahead of me, sometimes a long way ahead. When he realised it wasn’t a race, he lost all interest. Clearly he was cut out to be a sportsman, to end up running a sports shop. I too loved sport, especially swimming, but it didn’t dominate my life, as it did with him.

I kept writing music while in business, and then my Piano Sonatina was performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden in 1955. After that we decided I should work part time in the shop and devote more time to writing music. I subsequently won a scholarship to study overseas and I decided to go to Oxford.

I thought that an Oxford doctorate would be something my father would understand even if he didn’t understand my music. Oxford was revelatory for me. I’d thought that all musicians throughout the world thought in similar ways, but I discovered that my peers in Europe thought very differently. Furthermore, my mentor, Egon Wellesz, had just edited the Oxford Book of Primitive and Oriental music. One couldn’t use that title today. In it, there was no mention of Australian Aboriginal music. When I pointed this out to him, he replied “well it’s not important”. I replied “well it’s very important to me and it’s the oldest music on the planet”. That’s just a simple example of the difference in thinking.

Unfortunately around this time, my father got prostate cancer, and I didn’t finish my degree because I returned home to Tasmania at the end of 1960. After my father died, everyone wanted me to go back to Oxford. In those days England was a long way away and I couldn’t afford it. In any case, I only wanted the doctorate for him. Instead I wrote a work in my father’s memory called Irkanda 4. It was my first mature work, and the first work that received wide critical and popular acclaim.

In 1963, I became a lecturer at the University of Sydney. I really loved teaching, and since then Sydney has always been my base. I think it was probably my String Quartet No 6, written in 1965, that really established my reputation in Sydney. The reaction was mixed. I remember one critic writing that it sounded like an elephant dragging barbed wire across a corrugated iron roof. The next landmark occurred the following year in 1966, when the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was planning to do its first overseas tour. I was commissioned to write Sun Music 1. I remember having a bit of difficulty writing it, and so my good friend Bernard Heinz said “why not write a piece without melody?” That’s what I did.

The work enjoyed a wonderful reception overseas, and following that I received a publishing contract with Faber Music in London. I was the second composer to be contracted after Benjamin Britten, and I regard Faber as my second family. In I968, Bobby Helpmann choreographed a Sun Music ballet for the Australian Ballet, which received enormous attention in Australia and overseas. That year was also very important because I went to Japan for the first time. This trip affirmed the influence of certain Asian musics that I’d adopted.

In the 1970s, many of used to say we were Zen Buddhists. I stayed in a Zen Buddhist monastery and soon discovered it wasn’t for me. I had to divest myself of possessions, and I had previously bought a wonderful ancient gilded Japanese Buddha, which I had to put in a locker in the Kyoto railway station. Often I’d sneak out to the railway station just to have a look at it.  While in Japan I discovered Shintoism, a wonderful religion that is concerned with the sacred in all things. I was easily able to relate it to my own pantheistic beliefs. There was a famous garden at the Buddhist temple I stayed at in Kyoto, and if you looked carefully, all the plants and trees were pulled into shape with little wires. At the Shinto shrine everything grew as nature intended.

The late 1960s were dominated by my attempts to write an opera, originally a collaborative project with Patrick White. The opera was about Eliza Fraser, who was captured by Aborigines in the 1860s on what is now called Fraser Island. Patrick finally severed relations with me, as he tended to do with people, and I made various other attempts at an opera with other librettists. I finally assembled my own text for an opera based upon Latin and Aranda words.

The opera of course was Rites of Passage. People either loved it or hated it. I remember one night as I was bowing, a whole row of people booed me. Then the row of people behind stood up and thumped them. I loved that. A concert version of Rites of Passage is being performed at this year’s Canberra Music Festival and I am really excited about that. 

In the early 1970s I was in England as a visiting professor at the University of Sussex. Anne Boyd, a dear friend and former student, was in England at the same time. Having talked about it for a few years, we finally decided that we’d get married. Sadly, after I returned to Sydney, we decided to break off our engagement. I think we both felt that two composers in one house was one too many.   Actually I have never wanted children. I feel that my works are my children and there are now well over 350 of them, and most of them are rather demanding. 

Graeme Skinner’s biography of me ends in 1974. He is currently writing a second volume. There’s a good reason for it ending in that year. Since then, my travel has been limited to brief trips. These days I might be in England, Russia or the US for concerts, typically staying less than a week. Before that I had often lived elsewhere, sometimes up to two years at a time, such as when I was at Yale in the mid 1960s.  

From 1974 to the present, I’ve been much more settled and it has been a time of consolidation. The Asian influence was still important to me, but it gradually slipped away as Indigenous music became more dominant. The reason for this was that in the early 1970s books and recordings of Indigenous culture became more easily available. It should be said that I’ve been interested in Indigenous culture since I was in my teens. This was mainly because of the influence of my father, who told me many stories of past wrongs in Tasmania. I think he was quite extraordinary for that time.

In the mid 1970s, I began to write music about the Northern Territory. This has continued for at least three decades. Strangely I’d never been there, although I had many books about the Top End. When I wrote my orchestral work Kakadu, I surrounded myself with books on the park. After I visited Kakadu for the first time in the late 1980s, I realised it was very different from what I had seen in print. This was because the books were about the wet season and I went in the dry season. If I had known about the dry season, I’d have probably written a very different piece.

People often ask me, how can I write about a place I have never visited? Well Puccini never went to California and the Golden West, I don’t think Copland went further west than the Bronx, Vaughan Williams didn’t go to Antarctica and certainly Janacek didn’t go to the moon.

Although during the 1970s and 80s I didn’t lack for performances overseas, the Kronos Quartet took my level of performances and exposure to a new level. In particular they began performing String Quartet no. 8 everywhere and I wrote other quartets for them as well. I think I enjoy writing string quartets more than anything else. 

In the 1970s and 80s I also wrote many of the works for which I am now best known for, such as Port Essington, Mangrove, the Piano Concerto, Earth Cry and Kakadu. During the 90s, I entered what has been called my Kakadu Songlines period. This consisted of using a limited amount of material based upon Indigenous chant, and taking the melodies on journeys through a number of pieces. I continued doing this until early 2000, and then in 2001, I had contact with William Barton, the didjeridu player. I then began adding didjeridu parts to a number of my works.

I’d first used the didjeridu in a piece called The Fifth Continent in 1963. In those days we couldn’t find any didjeridu players. We used recordings and unfortunately technology often let us down, so I abandoned the idea. As it happened, there are many drones in my music reflecting the Australian landscape, and so it is not difficult to add a didjeridu to any of my works.

In my choral Requiem, which was first performed at the Adelaide Festival in 2004, I wrote a part especially for William. Originally it had parts for four differently pitched didjeridu, but when were preparing it to perform it in England I thought: “poor William, having to carry four didjeridu around the world”. I rewrote it for three.

William was a great success in Lichfield. Many people had never heard a didjeridu performed live. The concert was sponsored by BMW. To the sponsors’ surprise, at the reception after the concert when William was asked to play again, he shouted “BMW” into the instrument.

The Requiem is a somewhat political work: I began it at the time of the outbreak of fighting in Iraq. My thoughts were for the needless deaths of women and children and they are enshrined in the work. Probably my music is becoming more political. My String Quartet no 16, for instance, was written in 2007 for the Tokyo String Quartet. It’s about the feelings of asylum seekers who were needlessly held in detention.

If I am becoming more political in my work, my music has always been about nature, the environment, and more recently, climate change. I expect it will continue to be so. My recent work, Song of the Yarra, written for the opening of the Melbourne Recital Centre in February of this year, embraced all these issues, and also spoke for reconciliation.

Overall, what I find is wonderful about music and music making in Australia is its diversity. We are not bound by tradition. This is well illustrated in David Bennett’s recent book, Sounding Postmodernism”. David interviewed a number of composers and the wonderful diversity of opinion is quite astonishing. Recently I decided to bequeath a Chair in Australian Music to the University of Sydney. This will, I hope, continue everything to which my life has been committed.

Mind you, I plan to be around for a while yet.

The Music of Peter Sculthorpe

Images of emptiness and space have pervaded the Australian arts for over a century. Painters and more recently writers have become internationally celebrated, often using themes of isolation and alienation that are both radically Australian and disturbing testaments about the modern world. Music has also discovered the universal within the topical and local, in which respect Peter Sculthorpe may be one of the most important of living composers.

Sculthorpe was born on Australia’s farthest edge, in Tasmania, a region geographically and climatically similar to the old country, whence came the original settlers. Even though being born in 1929 he was late enough to profit from an evolving antipodean tradition, he felt the need, having graduated from Melbourne University, to study in England, and in Oxford at that. There he discovered his true identity, becoming the first composer to make a music distinctively Australian.

Two apprentice works from Sculthorpe’s pre-Oxford days merit mention, both for their intrinsic quality and for their prophetic nature. The Piano Sonatina of 1954 has a classical title and on the page betrays affinities with European models, especially the spikily economic piano textures of Bartók’s Mikrocosmos. Even so, the piece is not in sonata form, nor is it parasitic. On the contrary it is in tune with Sculthorpe.s verbal description of it as “the journey of Yoonecara to the land of his forefathers, and the return to his tribe”. This is what all Sculthorpe.s music is about, and the real hero is not the aborigine, but Sculthorpe himself.and anyone living in a rootless world that has lost touch with the earth as well as the forefathers.

In the following year Sculthorpe wrote a piece far more significant to his future.Irkanda I, which being monophonically scored as an "ancient chant" for solo violin, is of its nature more aboriginally Australian than a sonatina for a harmonically disposed keyboard. The native word Irkanda means a remote and lonely place; and the violin piece proved to be the first in a series, culminating in Irkanda IV, for solo violin, string orchestra and percussion.

Composed in 1961, immediately after Sculthorpe’s return from Oxford, Irkanda IV must count as its composer.s first maturely representative creation. It is about death in that it is a requiem for his father and for the past his family had stood for, but also in that it is a relinquishment of Europe. Several European ghosts, Bloch and Bartók among them, are laid, while Mahler’s threnody for the old world is obliquely recalled. Gradually the outback engulfs the self as the solo violin’s chant wavers microtonally between diminished fourths and major and minor seconds, while the string band evokes an eternal solitude by way of telescoped concords, sul tasto and tremolando.

This music expresses a deep human distress: which may be why, during the sixties, Sculthorpe needed to embark on his series of Sun Musics, wherein selfhood is not celebrated but denied, as the orchestra becomes a gigantic percussion instrument. Whereas in the Irkandas we have a music of the individual alone in space and time, the Sun Musics present a world devoid of human population, except in so far as the quasi-visual sounds come to us by courtesy of the composer’s listening ear and watchful eye. Sculthorpe’s nature, like Edgard Varèse’s, is far from benign, though the visual quality of the Sun Musics has a positive aspect in that the works embrace another kind of otherness, that of Asian musics, especially Japanese and Balinese.

Although many melodic strands in the Sun Musics are affiliated with aboriginal chant, others are derived from Japanese court incantation: so the Sun Musics may be related to Sculthorpe’s overtly Balinese pieces such as Tabuh Tabuhan, described by him as “gamelan music of sensuous, relaxed pleasure”, offering momentary respite from the terrors of the wilderness, and indeed of modern life. The first three of the fine series of String Quartets date from these years; but there is point in the fact that a climax to this phase of Sculthorpe’s melodic writing occurs in a work that, being scored for a solo stringed instrument, harks back to Irkanda I, the first essential Sculthorpe piece.

The Requiem for solo cello of 1979,another memorial tribute to his father, demonstrates that there is no necessary division between ritual mourning in Europe’s Roman church and in an aboriginal tribe. Death is indivisible, and the cello Requiem, starting from quotations of the plainsong rite, evolves into frenetic aboriginal incantation, and implicitly into mourning for any man, any time or place. It makes sense that in the year in which he produced the cello Requiem, fusing personal and collective destiny, Sculthorpe also created a work, scored for a largish orchestral group though not for an orthodox symphony orchestra, that may claim to be his masterpiece. Its title is Mangrove but the music is descriptive neither of mangroves nor of watery swamps, but is rather a recherche du temps perdu, including memories of a mangrove-free beach in Japan and of a New Guinea tribe that “believe men and women to be descended from mangroves”. Woodwind and harps are excluded, lest they might encourage over-obvious water noises; but antiphony between brass and strings brings tension between human expressivity and savagely non-human forces of nature. We are not allowed to forget that “human” and “bestial” are relative terms that overlap; percussion links the two, providing a continuum within which we live. The themes are literally aboriginal in springing from the acoustical rudiments of melody. This makes Sculthorpe a global village composer at the deepest level.

From the high plateau of Mangrove, Sculthorpe could survey new horizons and could return to the symphony orchestra in a work he originally thought of as Mangrove II. When the piece was finished in 1986, however, it admitted to new directions both in its title, Earth Cry, and in audaciously recasting a seminal work of 1974, The Song of Tailitnama. That work, originally for soprano, cellos and percussion, had been based on an authentic ritual chant of the earth at dawn; in Earth Cry the same quasi-aboriginal mode is used to generate gestural music of remarkable ferocity. Ritual mourning for the plight of the land and its pristine inhabitants is driven to exacerbated fury. Even so, the massive coda attains a potentially universal grandeur: a positive evolution that is fulfilled in another large-scale orchestral piece, Kakadu, engendered in 1988 by romantic love, in that it was commissioned by a Dr Papper as a birthday present for his wife.

In assessing Sculthorpe’s stature it is helpful to think of him in relation to two American composers whose influence he has acknowledged. Varèse we have already mentioned, noting how both he and Sculthorpe eschewed European traditions in order to begin again. The parallel is not, however, exact, for whereas Varèse was an outsider who, having delivered his frontal assault in the mid-twenties, relapsed into silence, Sculthorpe has gone on, integrating his aboriginality into modern life, where it might affect our everyday discourse. In this respect there is a closer parallel between Sculthorpe’s position today and that occupied a generation back by Aaron Copland who, born in Brooklyn at the turn of the century and a lifelong citizen of New York, asked a crucial question: Shall these bones live? In the black-jazz-derived blues notes, the declamation of the Jewish synagogue, the harsh metallic sonorities and rigid geometric serialism of the Piano Variations of 1930 Copland gave a painfully affirmative answer; and went on to establish an American tradition in which pioneer value of toughness and audacity find place also for hope, homespun humour, serendipity, even tenderness. Today, Sculthorpe offers a comparable testament for our time.

He has always lived in cities, but his affirmation is wrung from a machine civilization.s impotence in the face of the Australian emptiness. In its time, Copland’s Americanism spoke on behalf of the entire industrialized world. In our day, Sculthorpe’s ecological music brings home the acuteness of our predicament. How far may we still be succoured by our too-long-civilized past? Western man can no longer think of himself as civilized in the midst of barbarians. Not only do we share the world with the great Asian civilizations, but the newly emergent Third World proffers a measure of tribal consciousness. As our pluralistic society breaks barriers, we must acknowledge that for spiritual survival we need these cultures no less than, for material survival, they need us.

In 1977 Sculthorpe produced a relatively “light” work, based on a score he had made for a documentary film, that bears directly on this social and psychological crisis. Port Essington orchestrally tells the true story of how a settlement established in 1838 was abandoned in 1849, because the white man could not adapt to nature.s exigencies. Opening with the empty bush, the work flows into a chain of variations on an aboriginal melody that changes identity as the age-old narrative mythology is fused with the new society of the settlers, who play pastiche 19th-century salon music in the form of a mindlessly twittering string trio. Song, indigenously coloured or whitely alien, is sundered by harmonic disruption and rhythmic dislocation, until only the bush is left. The evolution of the piece, from empty wilderness to its indigenous population, to the encroaching aliens to the Estrangement, and so again to emptiness, is a myth of the human psyche, as well as a potted history of Australia. Not only the aborigines are defeated; the white man too sounds pathetically vulnerable. What Auden said many years ago has become true in a more radical sense than could have been dreamt of: “we must one love another – (and the earth we live on) - or die”.

- Wilfrid Mellers (1914-2008)

(© The Estate of Wilfrid Mellers)